Crocodile for Lunch--Cambodia II

Our second day in Siem Reap was full of serendipity--impulsively chosen activities that were both touching and delightful.  We began the morning at the Angkor Artisan's School, which trains rural Cambodians to make lacquerware, sandstone sculptures, silver statues, silk paintings, and woodcarvings.  In one studio, all the silk painters were deaf. The school trains disabled artists, as well as healthy ones.  In the second picture below, a school administrator is showing us a pail of gold leaf which the artisans use. The showroom had exquisite quality crafts, stylishly displayed.

Next stop was the War Museum, funded by the Cambodian government on a shoestring budget.  It looked like any old field, with a cow grazing near a fence, but inside was an actual killing field where 30 human skulls had been found in a depression in the grass, now filled with rainwater.  During the murderous Pol Pot regime of 1975-79, this was one area where the murders had taken place. 

It was very quiet this morning, with a one-armed Cambodian veteran describing the rows of guns, mortars,and land mines, as well as the beat-up helicopters and rocket launchers from the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Americans--all who brought war to Cambodia. He even had a row of old Khmer Rouge jackets.

The vet handed me an AK-47 and an M-16 to fondle.  He handed Dave several varieties of land mines, which still kill children in Cambodian rural areas.  The children think the mines are plastic toys.  The most dramatic part of the tour was the veteran's own story.  His parents were killed by land mines in the 1990s. He lived with monks for a time but then joined the Cambodian Army at 14 as a child soldier.  He fought the Vietnamese on the border and lost his own arm to a land mine.  He now works for a Christian NGO in Siem Reap and volunteers at the museum.

Our guide, LeMon, told us that tourism is exploding in Siem Reap, with the numbers of visitors rising from 2000 in 1995 to 1.8 million in 2011, many of them from Korea and China.  The government has just finished a striking new Angkor Museum which is as elegant as many Western boutique museums.  The museum has eight galleries featuring different aspects of Cambodian art and history, including several films showing in a choice of six languages.  My favorite gallery was titled "1000 Buddhas" and had 1000 sculptures of Cambodian Buddhas in all sizes and materials, both modern and dating back 1000 years.

We spent the afternoon on a boat ride on Tonle Sap, the huge Cambodian lake which LeMon described as "Cambodia's heart."  It is roughly as large as the Great Salt Lake. We had our own boat and boatman.  The boatman was a 16-year-old boy subbing for his older brother. The boy spoke English fluently, seemed very smart, and said he wanted to go to college to become an engineer.  Dave had the camera and snapped shots of little boys marching along the lake shore naked, still wet from their swim; fishermen swinging their nets as Simon Peter did a world and many centuries away; and whole families huddled in small houseboats, cooking as they floated.

We stopped at one of several restaurant/shop/farms in the lake.  Le Man showed us the pen for crocodiles which are farmed in the lake and then sold for their meat and skins.  "Sometimes big families come to the restuarant and order a crocodile cooked up for the group while they wait," he said.  There were also snakes in bottles of wine.

And, there were mothers and children sailing in little boats alongside the floating restaurant, holding onto the pier with their hands."They're Vietnamese migrants," LeMan told us with disapproval.  Little kids wore live water snakes around their necks.  Dave traded $1 bills for photos, while I drank juice from a coconut and hoped the plastic straw had not been re-used, as the server casually wiped it off before handing it to me.

On our way to the airport, we stopped at the Blue Pumpkin, a sylish deli/bakery in the Old Market of Siem Reap, for "Khmer fruits" gelato and French macaroons.  Outside, families on motor scooters dashed by and little shops sold "pure silk" scarves which Le Mon warned us were fake.  Cambodia is such a combination of Western and Eastern, developed and desperately poor.